Bombs away!

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Dec 31, 2016

Phew! They don't make them like this any more. Come to think of it, they never have made them quite like this. A most unfamiliar return to the familiar.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 27, 2016

For all the effort poured into period recreation, the world of the film remains abstract, bordering on fantasy.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 23, 2016

It often feels like two different movies - when it's in thriller mode, it's a genuinely compelling film but the sweeping romantic period drama doesn't work nearly as well.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 19, 2016

Cotillard is the sole bright spot, and even she risks being upstaged by her fantastic wardrobe.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 1, 2016

Zemeckis is a master of the big, broad Oscar-bait drama, and he makes the most of a well-constructed screenplay by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises)

| Dec 1, 2016

Zemeckis's formidably staunch and precise technique, itself a nostalgic vestige of classic Hollywood movies, seals up the movie's joints and keeps the air of life out; it's a suffocated, lifeless adventure.

| Dec 1, 2016

All of which makes me wish I was happier with the finished film more than I actually am.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 29, 2016

Allied is technically immaculate from stem to stern. Every shot framed by Don Burgess feels purposeful, every one of Mick Audsley and Jeremiah O'Driscoll's cuts precise.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 29, 2016

Well-dressed but highly improbable.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 29, 2016

Zemeckis ... seems uncertain whether to treat the tale as a wrenching saga of split loyalties or as a glamorous jaunt. Having gathered all the ingredients for derring-do, he forgets to turn up the heat, and the derring never does.

| Nov 28, 2016

What a handsome empty shell of a movie Allied is. Despite the star power of Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, their scenes together fail to ignite even a glimmer of a spark.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 25, 2016

It is not the tearjerker it aspires to be. No chemistry? Or too much? Litmus test required. Lovely Lysanders, though.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 25, 2016

Its story and dialogue are so straightforward and comforting that even when you think you can hear the next beat coming-and you will-the finale still comes as a cathartic surprise.

| Nov 25, 2016

It's a by-the-clich love-and-war romp anxious to invoke Casablanca yet directed with pastel-toned inertia, going on paralysis, by an ex-Roger Rabbit director who seems caught in the headlights of a new, if hardly challenging (you'd think), challenge.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 24, 2016

They don't make 'em like they used to, except when they do.

| Nov 23, 2016

Well THAT was different.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 23, 2016

An old-fashioned film that slyly nods to contemporary sensibilities, "Allied" is an engaging showcase for Pitt and Cotillard.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 23, 2016

Pitt and Cotillard aren't convincing as a couple, although she tries harder than he does. They're lost amidst the sandstorms and plane crashes that Zemeckis is so good at conjuring.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 23, 2016

The pie-eyed adoration of cinema past beautifully complements a tale of two people (characters and performers both) who pretend for a living.

| Nov 23, 2016